The present invention relates to stick feeding apparatus and more particularly to a stick feeding apparatus for delivering one or more sticks to predetermined positions at a readily controlled rate.
In the manufacture of stick-mounted food products, such as lollipops, large numbers of sticks must be delivered rapidly to product-holding molds.
Because manual insertion of sticks requires far too much time and labor, both of which lead to increased product cost, stick feeding apparatus have been developed in an effort to automate the delivery of such sticks.
One problem with known stick feeding apparatus is that such apparatus cannot be relied upon to consistently deliver sticks simultaneously to each mold in a large array of product-holding molds. Of course, if a stick is not delivered to a mold when it is supposed to be, the use of that mold is lost for at least one production cycle and product materials may be wasted. Moreover, the entire manufacturing process may be slowed since a defective product may have to be manually extracted from a mold while acceptable products may be automatically extracted.
As indicated above, it is important that a plurality of sticks be delivered simultaneously to the product-holding molds. If the stick feeding apparatus in use cannot be relied upon to provide simultaneous delivery, each stick feeding cycle must be long enough to assure that at least one stick is delivered to each mold.
Another problem encountered with prior art apparatus is that if the apparatus is adjusted to assure that a stick is delivered to each desired position, there is a chance that more than one stick will be delivered to a position during each cycle. This is not only wasteful of sticks but may also lead to an interruption in the manufacturing process as the unneeded stick is manually removed form the mold.
While some of the foregoing problems can be remedied by the use of costly and more complex feeding apparatus, the disadvantages of this approach are clear. Not only is the more complex apparatus more costly to begin with, it generally requires more maintenance.